"I program, on average, three new songs every afternoon," sighs Dan Boland, Tori's long-time lighting director and, for the last few years, lighting designer. "It keeps the afternoons very interesting." Each night, Boland receives the ever changing set list minutes before Tori takes to the stage. Even then, the set can change midway through a show. Boland, however, incorporates this unpredictability into his design, and this was a key factor is his decision to use video.
"Every time that it's just Tori and a piano on stage, she can play anything at any time," notes Boland. "With one projector, I can paint a lot more pictures than I can with 21 lights." Boland opted to use the M-Box system from PRG, who also supply the lighting for the tour. The merger of PRG and VLPS last year has provided Boland with a vast array of standard content from both the M-Box and Virtuoso EX-1 media servers. Using the combined content resources of both, Boland creates abstract and subtle imagery as a video motif for each song. "One of the things that Tori insisted on when we started discussing video was no literal imagery," says Boland. "If the song was about winter, she did not want to see snow flakes." Images are projected on to a hexagonal projection screen - a nod to the The Beekeeper album - on stage right and provide a wonderfully asymmetrical feel to the whole stage design. With a grand piano and three other keyboards as the only other items of stage, it is easy to see why Boland has chosen video to break up an otherwise bare stage.Up in the air, things are equally as sparse with only 14 moving lights, a mixture of High End X-Spots and Studio Beams. "I'm glad they made the X-Spots a lot brighter," comments Boland. "They really are the king fixture now. I chose the X-Spots because they have lots of gobos in them. It's all about as much bang I as can get for my buck - as much variation as possible."
That being said, the stage is remarkably dark - in keeping with the generally moody tone of Tori's set for the night. Although there is nothing spectacular about the imagery that Boland creates on stage, the fact that each song looks different and designed, rather than just looking different for the sake of being different, says a lot about his talent as a designer. Keeping an artist sitting at a piano visually interesting to those at the back of the auditorium for two hours is no small achievement.
FOH engineer Mark Hawley and monitor engineer Marcel VanLimbeek have been working with Tori Amos since 1994, both on the road and in the studio. For this tour, they decided to make a major change in how they handle Tori's live performance, and went digital with the Yamaha PM1D. "There were a lot of reservations to start with," says Hawley, "but with the recallability of the PM1D, each time Tori plays a song, you can improve on it. Things change so drastically between songs that it gives me a lot more time to concentrate on her vocal, which I still do analogue."
An added benefit for both Hawley and VanLimbeek was being able to do away with the racks of processors and effects that would normally accompany them when using an analogue console. "We were worried about the sound quality because that's what Tori cares about," remarks VanLimbeek. "But it sounds immaculate. Tori always uses a lot of outboard gear, but with the PM1D, the graphics and effects processing is on board and the system is totally quiet."
For the PA, Hawley specified the Nexo GEO S series ultra-compact line array. "The problem with many line array systems is that in small theatres, you only need three or four boxes to cover the theatre b
